Transfer iPhone "on my phone" notes to icloud

I am having an issue with my iphone and i have no idea how to transfer my old notes to icloud, even after looking at many other topics. Basically i use the notes app on my iphone and never really used icloud to sync my notes, so they were always stored on my phone. Since i upgraded my Mac to Mountain lion, i received the Mac notes app which can sync your notes through icloud, so i decided to turn my icloud on my phone to sync notes as well. However, the issue is that none of the old notes were synced to icloud, but only the newest created notes are synced onto icloud. Whenever i open the notes app i have two accounts, one saying "on my phone" the other saying "icloud" < which i received once i enabled notes syncing to icloud. Any idea how i can transfer all the notes from "on my phone" to "icloud"?

I just spent 25 minutes with Apple tech support. Boy was the guy friendly. But useless. I was finding answers more quickly online than he was by putting me on hold and asking somebody on staff.

Bottom line is this:
If you created a Note on your iDevice before you activated iCloud or before you synced Notes with iCloud, there is no way to automatically sync them. They are stuck on your iDevice.

I'd put the whole NOTES FIASCO up there with MAPS FIASCO, except it's way lower profile and doesn't get press. This is a bug. Apple has no answer. Let's hope they are going to provide a PATCH for this bug.

The ONLY WAY to get those older notes to sync are to manually COPY the content of each and every one, then create a NEW NOTE, then PASTE the content into the new note, then delete the old one if you like. But I wouldn't delete the old ones till you're sure the new copied-pasted ones are synced.

IMAP isn't a solution. And it's pretty obvious that Apple is taking a first subtle step at trying to lock down the whole thing and get everyone into an iCloud subscription. Hey, why not cancel your Dropbox account? They wouldn't let Apple buy them out.

For Windows users, there's an app called CopyTrans that works around a bunch of iTunes dependent syncing, but really nothing for Mac users.

Bad Apple.

Hopefully there's an empty chair with some former Apple development manager-who-dropped-the-ball waiting for a solutions provider to enter and give their customers what they need. There have to be millions of frustrated Notes users.

Hey! I was just looked for an answer here but ended up figuring it out, it's really quite simple. (Assuming your issue is the same as mine) If you have Mountain Lion, open the notes app, click the little icon on the bottom of the side panel to make another side panel open. That will show the All Notes Accounts. You'll see an iCloud one and your email address on the other one. Just click on that one, all your notes from your iPhone(that are not saved with iCloud) will be there. Then just CNTRL A to highlight all of the notes, and drag it to the iCloud account on the side bar.

I have a Lion system, but not the email set up, so copying one note and pasting into a new note is the best way (for me).

However, because I'm an engineer I have optimized this manual procedure.

For each note you haven't already synched from your idevice (mine is an iPod Touch)...

Go to the last note. (Pick the last one on the iDevice because then they appear, once synched, to match the order on the iDevice.) Select-all (the text) and Cut the text, then Done. (If you Cut you won't have to delete the original note.)

If you didn't set up iCloud Notes sync before creating your first notes on our iPhone - these notes will remain on your iPhone - however, you could transfer them to your Gmail from where you can copy-paste into text files on our PC.

open the notes app, click the little icon on the bottom of the side panel to make another side panel open. That will show the All Notes Accounts. You'll see an iCloud one and your email address on the other one. Just click on that one, all your notes from your iPhone(that are not saved with iCloud) will be there. Then just CNTRL A to highlight all of the notes, and drag it to the iCloud account on the side bar.

Click to expand...

Thanks MKLefty - this worked for me and saved me bu**loads of time copying all of my notes!

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